eroslove
1) Chiefly, the repetition of the word "censorship" does not actually constitute censorship as such. Y'all can scream "censorship" til the cows come home, but selecting a different artistic direction for the game is not a suppression of free speech. It's not remotely illegal, and NRS is under no threat from any legal or political institution. Decrying "censorship" is a conspiratorial shorthand that evokes the dreaded feminist authoritarian (or, the bad mommy) in the hyperactive imaginations of anti-SJWs. If a company decides to go a different direction with its marketing campaign, for any number of reasons, this is not "censorship." To wit: if the women of MK11 looked like the women of MK9, NRS would suffer no legal penalties, nor would they even lose money. Any manufactured outrage against scantly clad female bodies would be free marketing for the company. Being a trending topic on social media is a financial boon, no matter how negative the coverage (at least in most corporate cases). Do you have any idea how much money Gillette pulled in from its recent controversial commercial? Capitalism has a funny way of making money off of outrage...almost as if this outrage is completely insincere and manufactured for profit! Wow!
Yes, it is censorship; even if you want to deny reality; censorship is the action that any person makes to control or suppress the behavior of others, usually in moral arguments, or any person who oversees the manners or morals of others. And it is undeniable pressure that make feminists like Anita Sarkeesian or activists journalists infesting all media, preaching their feminist moralizing trying to control or suppress behavior and imposing their morality on others, with their concepts ideological-moral like "objectification of female characters", "sexualized women", etc, pressure that ends with developers trying to get "points of respect" or "points of morality" from feminists; trying to please them so they do not criticize them using their moralizing. And with creative bosses that censor inside their teams to try to please these feminists and activist journalists, that is, doing SELF-CENSORSHIP. What is stupid and disrespectful with the clients themselves who are the fans. The fans are not interested in politically correct garbage or political ideologies in video games.
eroslove
2) MK has never been realistic, obviously. But the YouTube video confuses what is "realistic," as in, how do the mechanics of the game bend or break the scientific laws of our universe, with "artistic realism," which is an aesthetic category and not reducible to mechanics. In other words, gameplay and art direction exist on two separate axes. Changes to one axis (as in, giving Skarlet a "desert storm" outfit) will not necessarily require changes to the other axis (Skarlet's "desert storm" outfit does not tamp down the brutality of the violence in this game). Aesthetics and gameplay aren't completely separated from one another - I don't mean to suggest that. However, when the YouTuber asks "how come fatalities, but not boobs?" he is deliberately confusing apples and oranges. That is to say, having female character designs rooted in realism is not hypocritical or contrary to the spirit of MK: this artistic style runs no interference with the usual levels of violence and gore one expects from an MK title. And again: MK has never been bloodier or more gruesome!
Let's talk about "artistic realism" as you call it, your whole excuse revolves around the fact that it is "realistic" to cover women in MK11, but what about covering men? If it is so "realistic" to cover women why it is not "realistic" to cover men as well?
Again, let's talk about "artistic realism" How "realistic" is a shirtless Kano or a Kano with a pirate cap on MK11?
Again, let's talk about "artistic realism", How "realistic" is a Skarlet with a Cold War suit? Not to mention that all of Skarlet's censored costumes are against the very fact that Skarlet needs to be as naked as possible so she can absorb the blood of her enemies and become stronger, an all-covered Skarlet is as stupid as a Superman with a Kriptonite necklace.
I could go on forever ...
But with your SELECTIVE REALISM, everything that involves all-covered women is fine.
Your excuse of selective realism is stupidly ARBITRARY.
eroslove
3) The much-quoted Beran passage has been dissected plenty, but again, allow me to reproduce it here. The YouTuber didn't offer a close reading of it (how telling!), he just let it flash in the background of the screen for a few seconds. “Our character lead, Brendan George, has been a breath of fresh air of just introducing new ideas. Our design is just getting more mature and respectful. You’re not going to wear a bikini to a fight. You’re not going to be showing so much skin. I think it’s just what the game is about: You’re going in to fight for your life, and you’re not going to be wearing such scantily clad items. "I’m sure that will disappoint some fans. We don’t have bathing suit fighters, and I think that’s fine. If people are disappointed, I don’t regret making that change by any means." Note the emphasis in his speech on design, and what these artistic choices are meant to convey to the players/consumers. He's not saying: "it's offensive that women could wear bikinis to the fight, we at NRS are taking a brave stand against the injustice of bikini fighters, because we believe women should be covered up before their faces are ripped off!" Rather, his words are gesturing toward tone and mood: "You're going in to fight for your life" is not necessarily about "realistic fantasy armor," it's meant to convey the feeling of dramatic intensity, of high pressure stakes, of nail-biting tension, wherein one false step during kombat can lead to your gory demise. Stripper outfits, while fun, distract from or diminish that ambiance of dread and tension. It's harder to sustain tension when kombatants look like disposable sex dolls: you care less what happens to them on the screen if they're already too cartoonish or garish in their designs. You can choose to read into his words, claiming that he's a tool of the SJWs, or you could bother to actually understand him on the sentence-level. The art direction changed on female characters because MK is trying to find the right balance between the goofy and the serious, between what is "unrealistic" and the longstanding gaming trend toward realism (and in order for MK to compete on the market, it must consider these trends!). All MK games in the series fall somewhere on these two axes of goofy and serious, some titles being more goofy and some being more serious, but they all fall differently, and MK11 continues that tradition, rather than breaking from it, as so many on here claim.
you wrote more than 25 lines and did not say anything
"Stripper outfits, while fun, distract from or diminish that ambiance of dread and tension." (It's funny that you do not talk about " male strippers outfits" in MK11).
Pirate caps or Skarlets with Cold War costumes, totally absurd things, do not "distract or diminish that atmosphere of fear and tension" BECAUSE SELECTIVE REALISM
Again
But with your SELECTIVE REALISM, everything that involves all-covered women is fine.
Your excuse of selective realism is stupidly ARBITRARY.
eroslove
4) The comparisons to UFC or the WWE are seriously misguided, and again, confuse apples and oranges. Mortal Kombat is a high fantasy/horror/sci-fi adventure series, presenting a hodgepodge mixture of tropes and aesthetics that are not reducible to any one recognizable genre or style. The attire of professional female fighters cannot be levied as some mandate for stripping MK's women down to booty shorts and sports bras. Last I checked, there is not a single UFC female fighter in MK's roster! Ergo, these women will look and behave differently when it comes to dressing in battle! You cannot argue that Mortal Kombat should never be realistic, and then in the same breath, demand that Mortal Kombat must draw some equivalency between an extraterrestrial 10,000 female assassin-warrior princess and Trish-flippin'-Stratus. If Earthrealm picks a UFC female fighter as a new chosen one, I have no doubt that NRS would design the character with her career choice in mind! And for the record, as a lifelong Kitana fan, I do not wish to see her wearing some female pro-wrestler costume because, and let me say this slowly for you now, she is not a pro-wrestler.
"There is not a single UFC female fighter in MK's roster!"
The same goes for, for example, Skarlet is not a Soviet agent of the Cold War or Kano is not a pirate of the eighteenth century that crosses the 7 seas.
Again
But with your SELECTIVE REALISM, everything that involves all-covered women is fine.
Your excuse of selective realism is stupidly ARBITRARY.
eroslove
5) It is a huge logical leap, and it's based on 0 empirical evidence, to argue that changes to visual battle damage on character models must come from an aversion to showing Sonya's underboob hanging out of her ripped jacket. The much more reasonable, Occam's razor, explanation is that incorporating highly detailed battle damage on all skins would stretch the available memory on the game, impeding performance, they're probably a huge time investment to animate and draw, and cuts had to be made. Blood splatters are a lot easier, and take up way less space, to incorporate. Is it even possible for anti-SJWs to conceive there might be other, perfectly plausible explanations behind world phenomena that don't affirm and support the paranoid conspiracy-theory world in which they reside? At this point, I highly doubt it! No, everything, no matter how minor, must be an interlocking piece of the feminist nightmare jigsaw puzzle. Graphical limitations on games still exist, no matter how afraid of feminists you may be!
this is too silly
eroslove
6) Which leads me to my final point. I find it remarkable that the anti-SJW people, who so loathed and seethed at Sarkeesian for daring to suggest that patriarchal attitudes might inform or influence character designs, now are absolutely squawking and balking like headless chickens because one game had the nerve to put female paramilitary officers in...female paramilitary gear. Congratulations, anti-SJWs! You have fully become the thing you hated so much: everything is a matriarchal conspiracy, no other possible or reasonable explanations for simple design choices exist anymore, and you have now manufactured a culture of fake outrage and oppression of which you hope to never end. Admit it: you LOVE that NRS slapped a cloak on Jade's head. How else would you be able to feel so outraged and oppressed?
"...you LOVE that NRS slapped a cloak on Jade's head. How else would you be able to feel so outraged and oppressed?..."
The same exposes you, because it seems to be a projection in others of your own feelings as a feminist activist.
The fans do not want all this feminist stupidity that is gangrene the video games with SJW ideologies. The fans only want to buy their games as the CUSTOMERS that they are and relax playing, they do not want political garbage in their videogames. The fans wish all this feminist crap and SJW would never have happened.
The fans legitimately claim as CUSTOMERS that they are so that the product they are buying is not contaminated or censored by feminist ideologies or other SJW.
